Good lord, defragging is useless in most cases to begin with*, and you guys are worried about defragging an *iPod*?? (Okay, so this thread is from 2002 originally, but yeesh.)
As pointed out, defragging a flash based drive is pointless, and I can't imagine a non-boundarycase scenario where it would be actually useful for the Classic iPods. Dear Windows guys: not every drive needs to be defragged on a regular basis. Love, Kickaha.
the cool gut, you said: "There are other ways a drive can get fragmented. Just the head scanning over the magnetic data causes fragmentation." Could you elaborate? I think we have different definitions of the word 'fragmentation' here.
*MacOS X defrags all files under 20MB in size on the fly, and keeps a list of hotfiles that are best kept close to one another for related use, *and* takes into account the drive that you're working with. Many defrag tools are about as bright as a box of rocks, and can, by working against the logic on the drive firmware**, significantly slow down that read speed you think you're getting. If you're on a Windows PC, of course, it's still a necessity for optimizing performance. On a Mac though? The only people I can suggest need to do this (beyond a placebo effect) are those who are working with very large high-def video files in non-linear editing suites. Those can really tax a drive system if the files are scattered hither and yon.
**Most drives sold today do a decent job of laying out the files so that they are as fast as possible given the rpms, the head movement parameters, etc - in other words the fastest access/read times may *not* be accomplished by putting the blocks in strict physical order. Tools that override this logic to present a totalitarian physical layout to the user are working *against* the device, not with it. It seems to make some users happy though, so what the hell, right?
Comments
As pointed out, defragging a flash based drive is pointless, and I can't imagine a non-boundarycase scenario where it would be actually useful for the Classic iPods. Dear Windows guys: not every drive needs to be defragged on a regular basis. Love, Kickaha.
the cool gut, you said: "There are other ways a drive can get fragmented. Just the head scanning over the magnetic data causes fragmentation." Could you elaborate? I think we have different definitions of the word 'fragmentation' here.
*MacOS X defrags all files under 20MB in size on the fly, and keeps a list of hotfiles that are best kept close to one another for related use, *and* takes into account the drive that you're working with. Many defrag tools are about as bright as a box of rocks, and can, by working against the logic on the drive firmware**, significantly slow down that read speed you think you're getting. If you're on a Windows PC, of course, it's still a necessity for optimizing performance. On a Mac though? The only people I can suggest need to do this (beyond a placebo effect) are those who are working with very large high-def video files in non-linear editing suites. Those can really tax a drive system if the files are scattered hither and yon.
**Most drives sold today do a decent job of laying out the files so that they are as fast as possible given the rpms, the head movement parameters, etc - in other words the fastest access/read times may *not* be accomplished by putting the blocks in strict physical order. Tools that override this logic to present a totalitarian physical layout to the user are working *against* the device, not with it. It seems to make some users happy though, so what the hell, right?